If you’re like me, you care passionately about certain subjects; the natural flip side of this is being viscerally revulsed by certain things. As a matter of mental hygiene I’m fairly picky as to who and what I let into my world, but unfortunately, on the world wide web, it can be tough to avoid being forced to give some of your mindshare to things that are just plain not productive to pay attention to.

With this in mind, I created a browser userscript I call the “WebCooler”. WebCooler sits in your browser, hosted by a free userscript manager plugin like GreaseMonkey or TamperMonkey. You supply it with lists of words and topics you don’t care to see, and it cleanly and invisibly removes those matching terms from the web, not by erasing just those words, but by silently and invisibly hiding entire paragraphs, news articles, headlines, links, social media posts, YouTube video suggestions, and the like, so you never even notice something missing.

As it was designed for my own use, it’s not user-friendly, although code comments are included to help set it up. Some knowledge of regular expressions might be minimally helpful in understanding it.

The performance isn’t 100% great with long block lists, so I periodically trim things down to keep it running smoothly.

Imagine surfing the web in a world completely free of certain odious political, media and entertainment-world figures… never, ever seeing any mention of them anywhere online. Never being reminded they exist. Through the power of technology and the strength of my cantankerous streak, this is my life.

Following are the explanatory README, the script code, and license, embedded from my repo on Github at https://github.com/kupietools/webcooler-userscript.